The Wizard of Odd
(cont'd.)

It was 11:30 p.m. and I was starving, but more than that, I was eager to get my young LaRouchie hosts to hang out in a normal, outside-the-campaign setting. They already said they were tired, so my goal was to keep them up 'til 2 or 3 a.m. and see if I could get them to dish out some answers to tough questions.

But I should have known we were headed for trouble when they said they needed to find a gas station "right away." Pasadena was only 15 or 20 minutes away, I figured, how bad could it be? The only time I'd ever seen someone run out of gas was in a movie.

But two blocks later, it happened to us. Boom, out. All she wrote. No gas station in sight. And I was the only one with a AAA card. I wound up having to pay for the $5 in gas the tow-truck guy provided. So not only did these "campaign workers" not have enough cash to keep their gas tank above "E" while escorting a reporter at midnight, they didn't have the money to pay the guy who was saving their ass. The AAA man looked at our "LaRouche in '04" badges, tried not to snicker, and headed into the night.

I was determined to get my secrets. However, more importantly, I wanted to get breakfast. Denny's awaited.

Hours later, we finally pulled into Denny's, and as the LaRouchies devoured their meals, the conversation turned a little more casual and a lot more revealing. They were stressing out about getting home and asleep because they had to be up for work the next morning, but I asked if driving a reporter around counted as racking up some hours on the job. Marco, said they might get to sleep in for an hour, meaning they could get started at 8:30 instead of the usual 7:30 a.m.

"7:30?!" I spat out. "So what time do you finish? 3:30 or 4 p.m.?"

"No!" they laughed, like the 8-hour workday was the silliest concept in the world.

"We work until 10 usually," said Tony.

But if you thought they'd be done after a grueling 15 hour work day, you'd be wrong.

"We teach each other classes in history or science or other topics 'til midnight most nights," said Marco. "Then we go to bed and start over the next day."

I asked them how they have time to have normal lives, how their schedules possibly jive with Lyndon's own speech about the social fabric and being able to have a balanced life with family. That they seemed like hip, young, good-looking guys who could do well with the ladies and aren't they missing out? I had heard that one big motive of the current recruiting wave was because the members weren't allowed to date and marry, and the original members had grown old or drifted off and the movement needed to recruit fresh blood just to keep going.

Tony's voice started to tremble with feeling.

"If you knew you had the chance to change the world, really make a difference, would any of the rest of that, anything else, matter to you, or wouldn't it seem silly and trivial?" he asked.

"Sure," I said. "But come on, I like some of what he has to say, but Lyndon is 81 and has been running for president for 27 years. I don't mean to be mean, but you have to know that he can't win."

He was silent for a moment. Then he leaned forward and pounded his arm on the table.

"OK, it's not about winning the presidency!" he nearly shouted. "It's about a revolution!" Thankfully, it was now approaching 3 a.m. and people expected odd behavior in Denny's.

"Like violent?!" I was freaking now.

"No, it's about turning society back to true culture - Renaissance culture. That's why we learn to sing chorale music when we join, and have reading days on the classics, and teach each other classes," said Marco.

"Popular culture is disposable, and wasteful and will die out. The classics will not. If it takes us 500 years, it doesn't matter. We will win!" said Tony, his fury back and his forearm pounding the table again. "We're revolutionaries!"

They may have been revolutionaries, but they weren't particularly well-funded ones. Even Marco revealed that he was broke and had to stiff me on the Last Meal Surprise at Denny's. Denny's is dirt-cheap, but I walked out the door footing a $45 bill.

So how does the campaign convince such bright young minds to get involved so thoroughly? First off, they play to the vanity of passersby.

"They convince you of your intellectual superiority," recalled one former follower from LaRouche's early-70s Manhattan era. "They tell you you know more than Einstein."

But if you ignore LaRouche recruiters, say officials at both UCLA and Pasadena City College, their efforts can get progressively more forceful. According to Burky Nelson, Director of Student Programming at UCLA, "The LaRouche people tend to be anti-authoritarian and use amplified bullhorns any time of day, disrupting classes and only backing down when we call in actual police."

Nelson has worked at UCLA since 1981, and said that "they've become much more vociferous the past few years." He gave several examples of how students are "aggressively followed and called names" to the point that they sometimes even call upon the campus police for help. Nelson singled out a particularly egregious disruption by a "LaRouchie" at an appearance last March by conservative heavy-hitters William Bennett, former CIA head James Woolsey, and Iraq reconstruction head James Bremer.

"There was an opportunity for the audience to talk, and the person for LaRouche asked a question but refused to get off the microphone and went into a diatribe that went against the principles that the question and answer session was about," said Nelson.

That's putting it mildly, according to UCLA student Robert Burgess, a fifth-year major in classics and history who was the recipient of some first-hand harassment by a "LaRouchie" on the day after the recall. After stopping by the LaRouche table and unwittingly commenting favorably about its nuclear energy pamphlets, the "LaRouchie" recruiter - a male whom I'll call Trucker Shades because of his enormous '70s-style trucker sunglasses - said "thanks" but was unable to contain himself from delivering an anti-Arnold diatribe.

"Did you know that if you'd donated to LaRouche we could have stopped the Nazi man-beast?" asked Trucker Shades, whose table signs also referred to the new governor by the same unflattering term. He apparently was unaware of the previous night's election results having reflected the state electorate's overwhelming desire to turn Gov. Davis out of office and willingness to put Ahnold in.

"He then said 'You know Arnold is a Nazi pig,'" said Burgess moments after he and Trucker Shades' heated verbal exchange nearly erupted into on-campus fisticuffs. "I said I didn't think that was fair because he's never had time to do anything in office, and he just kept repeating himself. He got so into my face I finally recognized him from the Woolsey event, and I remembered he was so full of shit then that people were ready to kick his ass."

When Burgess finally managed to break Trucker Shades' mind-melding force field, the unbowed recruiter immediately set his darkened sights on a group of Latino students, whom he proceeded to debate across several blocks of campus for the next hour before they finally begged him to let them study.

"It's kind of odd, really, because they try to make a lot of noise and draw attention to themselves but then they never seem to even take it far enough to collect information from people to get them to sign up for the group," said Burky Nelson. "I've never seen what happens when you say, 'I believe what you're saying and I want to get involved.'"

Meanwhile, over at Pasadena City College, the PCC Courier newspaper staff learned the hard way 18 months ago about what happens when a college paper dares to question the LaRouche campaign's on-campus recruiting. (The campaign, while cooperative in providing interviews with Schlanger, did not allow us to photograph their recruitment efforts anywhere). A former Courier editor wrote an unfavorable story about the organization, setting off a string of bizarre retributions that - according to current Courier Sports Editor Jaynita Carney - included LaRouche followers bringing a video camera to the Courier office many times and attempting to force staffers to comment on tape about their editor and their opinions about the LaRouche campaign.

"Once a week one of them would come up to visit us, and they would say if we were truly intelligent we would understand what LaRouche was about," said Carney. "[One] day they were talking about building a land bridge - from Russia to Alaska. After we changed editors it kind of died off, other than trying to film us for no apparent reason until we'd call in the campus police."

The now-retired chief of the PCC police, Phil Mullendorf, had plenty of run-ins with the LaRouchies during his 22 years on campus, with an increase in problems "for at least the last 10 years." Like Nelson at UCLA, he notes that as a public campus the school has to allow the LaRouche recruiters on their "haven for free expression of ideas," officials had to be wary for when their "annoying" conduct crossed over the line - and when he did take action, Mullendorf found that the LaRouchies retaliated in their own disturbing way.

"They retaliate in their own newspapers, and bring them on campus. They'll preach to kids not to go to school but to sign up for LaRouche and say that he'll take care of all your needs and in effect brainwash these kids," said Mullendorf. "So when we chased them off, they came out with a headline nationally saying 'Campus Nazis Are Smoked Out at Pasadena City College,' quoting our exchange, which led me to believe they had a little tape recorder going. Then they went online and found stuff like 'Mullendorf is part of the Campus Security Insitute, trying to intimidate me. The LaRouche people published defamatory information and some personal information in their paper," Mullendorf continued. "We got lots of complaints about harassment and intimidation, and [we] arrested one of them - for refusing to leave and trespassing - and when we arrested him we found he was carrying a knife on him."

In the end, the question of how to keep politically curious and committed students within the productive political mainstream rests upon giving them more than, as Michael Moore puts it, "passionate leadership to get behind." It lies in the Democrats or even Republicans or Greens reaching out to provide the same answers that Schlanger claims the LaRouchies find. "Five years ago, young people thought if I get a computer degree I can be a millionaire in 15 years. Now many young people see they have no future. Many in our group see that they're the 'no -future' generation," said Schlanger. "LaRouche says don't be an existentialist, fight for a future not just of money and comfort but [one that] addresses real problems that threaten mankind. That's what's different about this."

Until the other candidates can hit campuses with the same message as convincingly, more bright young minds will find themselves working 15 hour days for not enough money to eat at Denny's.

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